As long as I was on the path I walked hard, but when I came to the black beach I had to run.  For the tide was now nearly flowed; and to get through with my powder dry between the surf and the steep hill, took all the quickness I possessed.  As it was, even, the wash caught me to the knees, and I came near falling on a stone.  All this time the hurry I was in, and the free air and smell of the sea, kept my spirits lively; but when I was once in the bush and began to climb the path I took it easier.  The fearsomeness of the wood had been a good bit rubbed off for me by Master Case’s banjo-strings and graven images, yet I thought it was a dreary walk, and guessed, when the disciples went up there, they must be badly scared.  The light of the lantern, striking among all these trunks and forked branches and twisted rope-ends of lianas, made the whole place, or all that you could see of it, a kind of a puzzle of turning shadows.  They came to meet you, solid and quick like giants, and then span off and vanished; they hove up over your head like clubs, and flew away into the night like birds.  The floor of the bush glimmered with dead wood, the way the match-box used to shine after you had struck a lucifer.  Big, cold drops fell on me from the branches overhead like sweat.  There was no wind to mention; only a little icy breath of a land-breeze that stirred nothing; and the harps were silent.

The first landfall I made was when I got through the bush of wild cocoanuts, and came in view of the bogies on the wall.  Mighty queer they looked by the shining of the lantern, with their painted faces and shell eyes, and their clothes and their hair hanging.  One after another I pulled them all up and piled them in a bundle on the cellar roof, so as they might go to glory with the rest.  Then I chose a place behind one of the big stones at the entrance, buried my powder and the two shells, and arranged my match along the passage.  And then I had a look at the smoking head, just for good-bye.  It was doing fine.

“Cheer up,” says I.  “You’re booked.”

It was my first idea to light up and be getting homeward; for the darkness and the glimmer of the dead wood and the shadows of the lantern made me lonely.  But I knew where one of the harps hung; it seemed a pity it shouldn’t go with the rest; and at the same time I couldn’t help letting on to myself that I was mortal tired of my employment, and would like best to be at home and have the door shut.  I stepped out of the cellar and argued it fore and back.  There was a sound of the sea far down below me on the coast; nearer hand not a leaf stirred; I might have been the only living creature this side of Cape Horn.  Well, as I stood there thinking, it seemed the bush woke and became full of little noises.  Little noises they were, and nothing to hurt — a bit of a crackle, a bit of a rush — but the breath jumped right out of me and my throat went as dry as a biscuit.  It wasn’t Case I was afraid of, which would have been common-sense; I never thought of Case; what took me, as sharp as the colic, was the old wives’ tales, the devil-women and the man-pigs.  It was the toss of a penny whether I should run:  but I got a purchase on myself, and stepped out, and held up the lantern (like a fool) and looked all round.